Hi-Tech Hackers Expanding their Business Bases

As per the latest study conducted by the security vendor Symantec, cyber-criminals are rapidly expanding their already large business and marketing networks to spread spam and push malware with the ambition to affect countless PCs world over.

Hi-tech hackers sell malicious computer software to illegal agents in cheap. These agents then promote the malware to clients, who may unsuspectingly get entangled in this fraud, or whose passwords, financial information and other confidential details may be thieved and exploited by identity theft gangs, the study revealed.

The most intelligent cyber-terrorist traps agents into long-term service contracts in order to automatically impel the latest exploits on innocent users and make up for patches created by authentic programmers.

During the period spanning between January and June 2007, Symantec found more than 212,000 fresh samples of malware, nearly three time increase from the second half of 2006, and above four time increase from the initial six months of 2007.

As per the 17 September 2007 bulletin of Theregister, the Director of emerging technologies at Symantec's security response, Oliver Friedrichs, declared that the advances made in Operating System (OS) security and security programs hackers needs to attract greater number of variants to evade detection. The growth is certainly impelled by hackers attempting to escape.

The study also emphasized in an upsurge in browser plug-in flaws and a spurt of 53% in phishing strikes since the previous research. As per Symantec, only three phishing toolkits resulted in almost 50% of the assaults.

MPack is an example of a professionally designed toolkit that is sold in the black market. Hackers use MPack's set of software plug-ins to lodge malware on numerous PCs worldwide and then spy the execution of the assault through different measures on its online, password secured and management console.

The research findings of Symantec covered the first half of 2007 and is based on the hacking details drawn together from over 120 Million machines installed with Symantec anti-virus program and above 2 Million tricky e-mail accounts created to draw spam and other dubious e-mails from all over the globe.